Subject: [FAQ] QRPBBB Operating standards and practices - 20220217

At this time the QRPBBB network is largely dependent on the 1200 baud VHF APRS
Digipeater network. Ideally, sites would use a simplex frequency, and through
the magic of store-and-forward, a network spanning the country would appear with
only the Shannon channel capacity limit to hold us back. However until that time
comes, hitchhiking over the APRS Digipeater network is the most available means
to find another site/station.

The APRS network is not designed to handle a lot of traffic from a single
station. Bob Bruninga demands that in general stations must transmit a packet
no more frequently than every 30 seconds, and the digipeater network develops
problems with more than 200 packets per hour over a region. At this time, the
thinking is the amount of QRPBBB-related packets in a region should not push
the total over 150 packets per hour.

So it is paramount to use the fewest lines=packets in a posting.


* * * * Best Posting Practices on the QRPBBB Network * * * *

Write and edit your posts like it's 1986. You have it the same as with a 1200
baud modem in a sharehouse with one telephone line.

Heed this 1980s Usenet warning! "Messages will be distributed to perhaps
thousands of [Amateur stations] throughout the entire civilised world. This will
require vast amounts of electricity and cost operators hundreds if not thousands
of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing."

Remember that this is an Amateur Radio network, and your licence operating
standards, conditions, and laws will apply. Watch out for bad Internet habits
like profanity and rudeness, making excuses for violating Copyright, being too
lazy to use Google, Spoonfeeding the habitually helpless too lazy to use
Google, topics in inappropriate groups, and compulsively posting just to
interact with anyone.

Top-posting and otherwise excessive quoting and lazy text editing is forbidden.
It wastes transmission time and will increase packet collisions with other
traffic on the network. Small chatty minimal-effort "Me Too!"-type messages
also waste resources. In general, messages of 2 lines or less should be avoided.
Think of writing 'letters' or 'bulletins' instead of 'chatting'. Email is still
everyone's friend. There will never be a Mobile App or Facebook support group.

Traffic is managed with the "Distribution:" header line. "qrpbbb" has the
strictest conditions and is the only distribution accepted for messages sent
over the APRS network.

"Distribution: qrpbbb" currently has following mandated conditions:
. the body of a message must have 100 lines or less.
. messages must be less than 10 kB in size
. only one packet/line is sent at a time.
. ..and that time is every two minutes.

Expect an average posting to take half an hour to distribute ..but there's 48
of those in a day. Still, being broadcasted/multicasted means all sites in the
2-span digipeater footprint can receive it at the same time.

"Distribution: radio" is for exclusive/simplex frequency use, and has more
generous limits, if still using 1200 baud links. Messages can be up to 100kB in
size, allowing for moderately-compressed images, source code, etc.

"Distribution: fastradio" is like it says, where there's effectively no limits.

The following conditions, typical of good Usenet posting practice, are demanded
for all 'sound' messages distributed through the QRPBBB network:
. no cross-posting.
. no top or bottom posting. 'Inline' posting with author responses interspersed
  through the replied message is how it's done.
. the poster's callsign must be mentioned somehow in the From: header.
. no quoting more than 5 lines of text at a time.
. and there's less than 4x of quoted material to original lines.
. lines must have less than 100 characters.
. References: only list the immediately-previous message being replied too.
. no preceding or trailing blank lines in the message body.
. only a subset of RFC1036 Header lines are accepted, the rest are removed.

(The last three conditions are automatically managed by the newsserver.)

GNKSA awarded Newsreaders expect text lines to be wrapped before the 80th
column. Don't even think about using an email program written for Windows!

> How should quoting be done?

Quoting should resemble the Usenet practice, as was just done here.

".signatures" or other ways of finishing a message should be limited to a single
line if you're really that vain to repeat what's already visible on-screen in
the headers.

An example of how *really* not to do it:
| and then the whole radio caught on fire!
|
| 73!
|
| /~\_/~\_/~\_/~\ Ben D. Wire /~\_/~\_/~\_/~\_/~\
| /~\_/~\_/ DX from Canberra Beach! \_/~\_/~\_/~\
| /~\_/~\_/~\_/~\_ VK1APR /~\_/~\_/~\_/~\_/~\_/~\

That will add 15 minutes to the transmission time of the message, and will get
you a cranky demand from QRPBBB's Copyright owner to delete the software and
leave the network. That rote "73!" on a line by itself is most annoying.

If you /really/ must, do it like this:
| and then the whole radio caught on fire!
|
| - Ben D. Wire - VK1APR - bendwire@baofeng.pub.uu.oz.au

When quoting, again use your editor's paragraph reformatting to tidy up. If
your text editor can't do that, get a better one. If you can't be bothered to
learn a new editor, leave.

Remember: post with as few non-blank lines as possible. Text should be
paragraph-formatted to the 80th column, as the Usenet practice. However
occasionally exceeding the right margin to avoid one or two words on the
following line is a good idea.


* * * * Newsgroup organization * * * *

The primary discussion newsgroup for the QRPBBB software is qrpbbb.general.
Developer announcements are posted to the moderated group qrpbbb.announce, with
the software development topics in qrpbbb.development. Email is of course the
way to discuss issues with Chris/VK2CJB when doing so on-air isn't ideal;
address: vk2cjb@gmail.com.

By all means create a top-level newsgroup with your callsign, with several
subgroups as you may require (callsign.general, callsign.blog, callsign.dev..)
"callsign.general" newsgroups are anything goes, but it would be best that your
"does anyone know?" posts go there, rather than just finding the most active
newsgroup and posting in that. The newgroup control messages can be posted to
qrpbbb.control, and keep an eye on the junk newsgroup for newsgroups others
have created.
